Table of Contents

1: Introduction: Crooked Lines and Moving Targets
Part 1. Theory: Materialism against Itself
2: The New Historicism: Back to the Future
3: Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art
4: Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialism: Modeling Praxis Without Subjects and Objects
5: A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza
6: What is New Formalism?
Part 2. Criticism: Field Theories of Form
7: Of Being Numerous
8: Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers
9: Parsing the Frost: The Growth of a Poet's Sentence in

About the Author

Marjorie Levinson is F. L. Huetwell Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she has taught since 1991. Prior to that she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, 1978-1991. She is the author of The Romantic Fragment Poem, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems, and Keats's Life of Allegory, and the editor of Rethinking Historicism. She has written numerous articles on Romantic and modern poetry and on
critical theory (e.g., 'What is New Formalism?'). Her work tracks a transition from sociocultural critique to models derived from the postclassical physical and biological sciences.

Reviews

It is always a wonder to get to read and think with Marjorie Levinson. And Thinking through Poetry is a big idea book. I was inspired by the ways the forms of the individual chapters increasingly experiment with the field theory of forms the book describes. ...Thinking through Poetry derives a new theoretical model for poetry and offers us a chance to think through poetry anew, with more rigorous attention to fields of differences and the ways poetry still matters.
*Brian McGrath, Modern Philology*